The scene its basically a box with openings in the roof. Although the light I am getting (I am using physical atmosphere) is really pleasant the room seemed to be a bit under exposed. I added to area lights on the sides with different intensity and I connected a blackbody node in order to pair the color temp to the sun. I did not want them to look like artificial lights from the sides…but more natural light.

I also added a portal over the roof openings cause I read in the manual it helps to lower the noise. The render got slower, but might be cause I did not decrease the sample values.

I am still not sure about the two lights on the side cause I still can see the visible fallof on the wall…getting darken towards the center…maybe if I could rise the light bounces from the sun within my scene I could get rid of those area lights?

Please feel free to critic or give suggestions about how to improve the lighting.

We’ve just discussed portals elsewhere. Look for it. They’re most useful to find world background shader through small openings, it doesn’t matter at all for sunlight and it matters less if you have big openings already.
The most “correct” way is to open up actual windows. However with a sun coming very straight down like that you’d only get a small strip of sunlight bouncing off the floor. Faking it with area lights are likely to produce less noise.
You’re suffering from “color bleed”, the bounced sunlight picks up the reddish tone from the floor and taints the light red. The two most common way to handle this is through color correction (adjust CM curves) to neutralize the color cast - let a white wall become white again, but this can change the color of importantly colored objects too much (floor and board). The other way is a node setup for the floor that takes away some of the saturation for bounced lighting. We just discussed this earlier as well, look it up.
You have a box on the floor with a board on the wall. There really isn’t much advice to give. Finish the scene, make it look interesting. Crap in = crap out usually. What is that thing on the wall anyway? I’m asking because I used to work with projection screens with those kinds of sizes and aspects, and doing rendered impressions of them. And in that case - you REALLY don’t want any sunlight to enter the room, possibly even block out daylight as those screens go really bad with ambient lighting present.

I will check for the node on the floor. I apologize for my in experience, but how to search for that ? Does the phenomena have any specific term?

The advice I meant “how to improve the lighting” intends to make more light enlighten the room. Not the scene composition. The idea is to place a bench and some art on the wall and maybe people to make it look as a museum room. I tried to add bounces in the sun parameter, but apparently the max is 1024. In a way I trying to find out how to make the sun light bounce more inside the room and get rid of the area lights on the sides, if possible.

There exist museums utilizing only natural light? Show me
Having sun at it’s maximum of 1024 (which is waaay more than enough) while using only 12 bounces in light paths doesn’t really mean much. Although you can crank up bounces, turn off clamping, and turn off light threshold completely, I doubt it’s going to make the room significantly brighter. My default goto values are 4500k 441 strength sun and 29 strength sky based on an articles I read long time ago (I don’t know if it’s near accurate, nobody can answer). With that set as kind of a physical value or reference point, you now start tweaking the exposure. Just as in real life. If I photograph my apartment, I can make it as bright as I want using exposure, whether it is sunny day or fully overcast. Although I would balance out the lighting according to atmospheric conditions if I did it in Blender of course.

Yes there are.
I will try to play with the exposure. Do you have a recommendation regarding the bounces ?
Do you usually use a certain amount more or less of bounces for interior. I am using the defaults now.

Increase until you see no significant change by adding more. A u-shaped corridor with a light opening in one end probably require more than a simple room with big skylight and window openings to light it sufficiently. Bounced sunlight may cause a lot of noise compared to skylight which is more direct, so you may want to bite the realism and stop the sunlight bounce and increase the skylight to compensate. Noise vs realism. There is no “this works for everything”. You can use the full GI preset, and still have noise issues as well as taking too long for no good reason.

I think you will be even more naturally pleased with the “look” of everything if you try this scene in LuxRender. It excels at exactly the subtle expectations you are expecting Cycles to fulfill that I don’t think it can without tweaks. I’d be curious to see the results if you choose to do so!

Yes I have been just following tutorials and trying. I did not find the time to seat and learn it. I followed the settings tutorial, but It was a little bit overwhelming. I love luxcore results, but it has some things that make my “switch” a little bit reluctant.

It is mostly the tedious workflow that reminds me vray had…you need to be a special engineer to go trough all the nuances of the parameters that make your render to be fast and great. I am planning to do it though!

Cycles is so good out of the box. I might try with this scene and post my trials with lux. Did you try it ?

I’ve been slowly falling in love with it - especially the beautiful values it pulls out of minimal scenes/subjects. Cycles has a certain plastic “falseness” to it to me comparatively now (could be in my head though). I am at the end of a week of learning/playing with Luxcore materials so I understand your hesitation but I think you will like it once you get into it. While it is a little weird at first I actually really like the core ideas now.

I’d love to see the same scene in Luxcore if you decide to do it! Hmu if you have any Cycles > Luxcore noob questions (which I may not be able to answer).

Thank you so much for making these great scene in luxcore. I think I will definitively give a try.
Do you notice a significant change between the luxcore and cycles samples?
I will download your scene and try to explore it.

Thank you for re-connecting me with my own work.
Also I wanted to mention that checked your loops on IG …great work men! Specially the nature loop!

Unfortunately I don’t have enough experience with interior renders in Cycles to definitively say Luxcore requires less samples.

That being said - I’ve seen a lot of more experienced people raving about it for interior scenes, where Cycles often has to grind much longer to get to an acceptable point. And to me Luxcore generally seems surprisingly fast for rendering. I’ve also seen people recommend to actually only use CPU for viewport because it keeps things very light and workable.

Thanks for your kind words on my IG - I am going to try to learn to create more refined visual clarity from designers like you! Thus my copying your scene haha! Sorry to derail your thread! Keep up the great work!